The Presentation of Self in Ethnographic Life, Part 2 of 2

The ethnographic project has long been predicated on an ethnographer accessing the “primitive” others’ backstage region without necessarily divulging too much of his or her own backstage life—at least not in the same way or to the same extent. Clearly, the ethnographer is always managing a complicated cross-cultural dance in the field, and he may perform missteps that portray him in ways that he would have preferred to hide. In fact, he could very well have hidden some of his own backstage existence inside that proverbial field tent, the one traditionally pitched on the outskirts of some village community. But more than that, he eventually left for “home” with a kind of finality that kept such distant locales decidedly off limits, even for the most curious of local “informants.”

With new media technologies like the Web, it has become increasingly easy for ethnographers’ formerly backstage presentations of self (back “home” in the Ivy Tower) to be accessed and assessed by subjects in the field. (Viewing an on-line version of a Stanford talk, per my last blog post, is just one example.) Of course, there are many things to be gained from such emergent backstage access, and research subjects mining this new portal is just one aspect of the changing state of ethnographic relations today.

It makes sense to think about how ethnographers are re-disciplined in a world where their backstage (back “home”) continues to shrink. That might just be another leveling of the ethnographic playing field, maybe even a welcome one, but it does demand that we reconfigure the ethnographic context to include the kinds of feedback loops and post-fieldwork exchanges that the Internet and other new (increasingly inexpensive) technological outlets facilitate.

Johannes Fabian has recently written about the possibility of a “virtual archive” that allows ethnographers to disseminate material more quickly than ever, providing the opportunity for almost immediate responses and critiques from research subjects themselves. Such real-time exchanges also mark the beginning of a radically different set of relations between ethnographers and research subjects. No matter where they are (and increasingly, no matter how much formal education subjects have completed), the Internet is becoming more and more useful as a mechanism for humbling the ethnographer’s aspirations for a kind of one-sided voyeurism, a structural instantiation of backstage access to the “other” from one’s own front region that represents another variation on that old theme of intractable power differences between researchers and those researched.

But the researcher is becoming increasingly researchable.

If a fundamental portion of the bygone backstage is no longer backstage for the ethnographer today, at least not the way it once was, not some safely invisible retreat behind of the opaque pillars of academic institutions, we might very well be witnessing a paradigmatic shift in the very nature of ethnographic research and in the ways ethnographers can be held accountable for any subtle discrepancies between their representations of “the other” among colleagues and their presentations of self in the field.